Former Taliban prisoner gives insights at Clark U. on turbulent part of world

WORCESTER — While some Clark University professors may be experts on the Middle East, David Rohde knows a lot about the Taliban.

After all, he was their prisoner for seven months.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Rohde told a crowd of more than 100 students at Clark University about his capture by a group of Taliban militants in Afghanistan in November 2008 while he was working for The New York Times.

The event was part of the "Framing Freedom" symposium hosted by the university's Higgins School of Humanities.

At the time of his capture, Mr. Rohde was newly married and on his way to interview a Taliban leader for a book he was writing about U.S. involvement in the area. He said that he took too much of a chance, which resulted in risking his life as well as those of an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and their driver, Asad Mangal.

"I let competitiveness get the best of me," Mr. Rohde said.

After being taken hostage, he and his companions were driven for two days and forced to walk about 11 hours before he realized they had been taken to a Taliban-controlled region of Pakistan.

During that time, he was held by about a dozen guards, ranging from radical to more moderate Islamists. Some, he said, were taking bomb-making classes.

They were living in an "alternative universe," he said, in which they had been taken from their families and recruited and brainwashed into believing that they were defending their religion from Christians trying to convert them.

"The guards had never seen the world beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said. "They believed they were fighting for their freedom of religion."

Like Americans, his captors enjoyed watching war movies and playing video games.

"I watched 'Band of Brothers' with the Taliban. I saw them play 'Delta Force,' " he told the crowd.

He explained how after dinner, the men would sing, and taught him al-Qaida songs and asked him to sing for them.

While they found "Imagine" by John Lennon "really boring," he said, their favorite Western tune was "She Loves You," by The Beatles.

With their machine guns in the corner of the room, "I'd sing the lyrics, and they'd sing the chorus," he said.

On the morning of June 20, 2009, Mr. Rhode and Mr. Luddin escaped to a nearby Pakistan army base.

The audience started clapping when he explained how he is now Facebook friends with the Pakistani commander who agreed to give them sanctuary at the base.

Their driver escaped a few weeks later.

"It was interesting because he (Mr. Rohde) was able to be level-headed about it all," said Dylan Young, a sophomore at Clark. "Not many people have that inside scope (of the Taliban)."

"I appreciate that it was a multi-sided story," said Tarikwa Leveille, a Clark junior and international development major.

Mr. Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner as well as a foreign affairs columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic, said he was thrilled with the turnout and level of interest of the students and with the faculty.

"Clark seems to be a place that tries to use those experts to address real-world (situations)," he said.

In addition to telling his story, Mr. Rohde talked about his views on the Middle East, including how he believes the United States has "tainted the idea of democracy in the Middle East."

He said the United States appears hypocritical for going after some countries while turning a blind eye to the faults of others, such as Saudi Arabia. Instead, he said, the United States should make a difference in the Middle East by practicing diplomacy, providing economic aid and fostering education.

"If the economy (in that region) doesn't start functioning better there's going to be more and more unrest," he said.

Mr. Rohde also said that while civilians in the Middle East do not want their countries to be run by jihadists, they also don't want to be invaded by American troops.

"They just want the violence to end and a bright future for their kids," he said.

That is why it is important to keep American diplomats in those countries and fully understand a situation before taking action, he said.

"The problem is not Islam," he said. "It's extreme views of the faith."